Minor feelings : an Asian American reckoning

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Hong, Cathy Park

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

206 pages ; 22 cm.

Summary:

"Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition--if such a thing exists? Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively confronts this thorny subject, blending memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth."--

Contents:

United -- Stand up -- The end of white innocence -- Bad English -- An education -- Portrait of an artist -- The indebted.

Subject Term:

Asian Americans -- Biography.

Asian American women -- Biography.

Poets, American -- 21st century -- Biography.

Publication Info:

New York : One World, [2020]

Subject:

Asian Americans -- Biography.

Asian American women -- Biography.

Poets, American -- 21st century -- Biography.

Hong, Cathy Park

Asian Americans -- United States

Women, Asian American

American poets

SAILS ISBN:

9781984820365

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Bridgewater Public Library	305.895 HONG 2020	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Attleboro Public Library	920 HONG	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Elizabeth Taber Library	305.895 HON	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Fall River Main	305.489 H772	Stacks	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library	305.895 HONG	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... New Bedford Free Public Library	305.4895 HON 2020	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Norfolk Public Library	305.4895 HONG	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER * ONE OF TIME 'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE * A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness

"Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human."--Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

In development as a television series starring and adapted by Greta Lee * One of Time 's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year * Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, New Statesman, BuzzFeed, Esquire, The New York Public Library, and Book Riot

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative--and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they're dissonant--and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.

With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.

Praise for Minor Feelings

"Hong begins her new book of essays with a bang. . . .The essays wander a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt. . . . Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness." -- The New York Times

"Hong uses her own experiences as a jumping off point to examine race and emotion in the United States." -- Newsweek

"Powerful . . . [Hong] brings together memoiristic personal essay and reflection, historical accounts and modern reporting, and other works of art and writing, in order to amplify a multitude of voices and capture Asian America as a collection of contradictions. She does so with sharp wit and radical transparency." -- Salon

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this blistering essay collection, poet Hong (Engine Empire) interrogates America's racial categories to explore the "under-reported" Asian-American experience. Hong, a child of Korean immigrants, was born in Los Angeles's Koreatown, but moved from the neighborhood before the 1992 riots upended the area. Her topics include personal experiences, from learning English as a second language and obsessing over her scented Hello Kitty--branded erasers as a child, to mining the repertoire of Richard Pryor as a young woman entering the stand-up scene. She is both angry and wryly funny when examining her struggles with depression, hemifacial spasm disorder, and poetry peers who dismissed her first book as "hack identity politics." Assessing perceptions of Asian-Americans as "next in line to be white," as one man tells her, she observes that in fact they have the "highest income disparity out of any racial group" in the country. Her confrontational prose maintains a poet's lyricism in "The End of White Innocence," which recalls a childhood "spent looking into the menagerie of white children." Combining cultural criticism and personal exploration, Hong constructs a trenchant examination of race in America. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit. (Feb.)

Booklist Review

Title aside, nothing is minor about Hong's taut, sharp collection. The award-winning poet's prose debut will elicit comparisons to contemporary race-conscious luminaries think Claudine Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Roxane Gay but Hong's singular voice expresses both reclamation and declaration: For as long as I can remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence . . . Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough. Seven stupendous essays mark her journey toward claiming agency. She exposes collective Asian American history and spotlights today's racially charged complicity in United."" She channels Richard Pryor's raw energy and the manipulations of L.A.'s 1992 race riots in Stand Up. She unmasks white fragility in End of White Innocence, and she subverts language in Bad English."" Hong reveals intimate female friendships in An Education, confronts the brutal rape and murder of iconic artist Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha in Portrait of an Artist, and refuses to be grateful in The Indebted. L.A.-born to Korean immigrant parents, Hong creates a fierce amalgamation comprised of careful memoir, radical history, sociopolitical treatise, and revolutionary call-out. Being woke, she notes, is already a hashtag that's now mocked, when being awake is not a singular revelation but a long-term commitment fueled by constant reevaluation. Apologetic no more, Hong proves, We're everywhere now. --Terry Hong Copyright 2020 Booklist

Kirkus Review

The poetry editor of the New Republic discusses her experiences living and working in a culture hostile to expressions of Asian individuality and identity.In this memoir in essays, Hong (Engine Empire, 2012, etc.) offers a fierce and timely meditation on race and gender issues from her perspective as a Korean American woman. She begins by reflecting on her struggles with depression, which she traces to being forced into the role of model minority. Working harder than everyone else for recognition as an artist, she describes how she watched herself disappear into the "vague purgatorial" no-man's land inhabited by other Asian Americans. The author details how her experiences developing bonds with other talented Asian American women in college taught her to take herself seriously in a world that stereotyped Asians as "math-crunching middle managers." She began developing a greater sense of race consciousness when watching comedian Richard Pryor, which she explores in the essay "Stand Up." His no-holds-barred comedic monologues embodied racialized "negative [and] dysphoric" emotions with which she immediately identified. In turn, Hong attempted to access those "minor feelings" through her own brief foray into stand-up comedy. Like the experiments with language she discusses in "Bad English," the author was seeking a way to speak honestly about her own experiences with racism in an effort to end "white innocence," a concept she addresses sharply in a separate essay. As she sees it, the United States has achieved dominance through "the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy." In "Portrait of an Artist," Hong discusses Asian female invisibility by delving into the groundbreaking work of artist and novelist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Seeking to force confrontation with Cha's largely undiscussed murder, Hong examines how Cha died while suggesting that Cha's preoccupation with discursive erasure was a manifestation of revolutionaryrather than "feminine" self-silencingimpulses. Candid and unapologetically political, Hong's text deftly explores the explosive emotions surrounding race in ways sure to impact the discourse surrounding Asian identity as well as race and belonging in America.A provocatively incisive debut nonfiction book. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

Poet and essayist Hong's family history beautifully details how her life and art have been shaped by her Korean American identity. Among the many topics the author explores are the violent history of Korea and how that heritage has impacted generations of her family, her discomfort and confusion navigating her race as a child in the Los Angeles area, and how race affected friendships and mental health throughout her life. She also dissects popular culture, from Richard Pryor's stand-up to the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Every page is packed with details and reflections on the myriad ways that Americans' lives are shaped by race. The author has a particular talent for bringing a moment to life, inviting readers to confront the raw emotions of a given scene. She does not shy away from complication or bluntness, but presents her truth with all its complexity. VERDICT An extraordinary blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and history that will invite readers from all backgrounds, though especially those who identify as Asian American, to consider the complex relationships between race, family, heritage, and society that shape American lives.--Sarah Schroeder, Univ. of Washington Bothell

Excerpts

United My depression began with an imaginary tic. For an hour, I stared at the mirror, waiting for my eyelid to flutter or the corner of my mouth to tingle. "Do you see my tic?" I asked my husband. "No." "Do you see my tic now?" I asked my husband. "No." "Do you see my tic now?" I asked my husband. "No!" In my early twenties, I used to have an actual tic in my right eyelid that spread so that my right facial muscles contracted my eye into an occasional Popeye squint. I found out I had a rare neuromuscular condition called hemifacial spasm, triggered by two cranial nerves behind my ear that became twisted. In 2004, when I was twenty-six years old, a doctor in Pittsburgh corrected my spasms by inserting a tiny sponge to separate the two entwined nerves. Now, seven years later, I was convinced my spasms had returned--that somehow the sponge had slipped and my nerves had knotted themselves up again. My face was no longer my face but a mask of trembling nerves threatening to mutiny. There was a glitch in the machine. Any second, a nerve could misfire and spasm like a snaking hose hissing water. I thought about my face so much I could feel my nerves, and my nerves felt ticklish. The face is the most naked part of ourselves, but we don't realize it until the face is somehow injured, and then all we think of is its naked condition. My self-conscious habits returned. I found elaborate ruses to hide my face in public, cradling my cheek against my hand as if I were in constant dismay, or looking away to quietly ponder a question about the weather when all I could think of was my ticklish nerves that could, any second, seize my face into a tic. There was no tic. It was my mind threatening mutiny. I was turning paranoid, obsessive. I wanted someone to unscrew my head and screw on a less neurotic head. "Stinking thinking," my husband called my thinking. To try to fall asleep, I ingested whiskey, then whiskey with Ambien, then whiskey with Ambien, Xanax, and weed, but nothing could make me sleep. When I could not sleep, I could not think. When I could not think, I could not write nor could I socialize and carry on a conversation. I was the child again. The child who could not speak English. I lived in a beautiful rent-stabilized loft on an unremarkable corridor of Lower Broadway known for its retail jeans stores that pumped out a wallpaper of Hot 97 hits. I was finally living the New York life I wanted. I was recently married and had just finished writing a book. There was no reason for me to be depressed. But anytime I was happy, the fear of an awful catastrophe would follow, so I made myself feel awful to preempt the catastrophe from hitting. Overtaxed by this anxiety, I sank into deep depression. A friend said that when she was depressed, she felt like a "sloth that fell from its tree." An apt description. I was dull, depleted, until I had to go out and interface with the public, and then I felt flayed. I decided to see a therapist to treat my depression. I wanted a Korean American therapist because I wouldn't have to explain myself as much. She'd look at me and just know where I was coming from. Out of the hundreds of New York therapists available on the Aetna database of mental health care providers, I found exactly one therapist with a Korean surname. I left a message for her and she called me back. We set up a consultation. Her small, dimly lit waiting room had a framed Diego Rivera poster of a kneeling woman holding a giant basket of calla lilies. The whole room was furnished in Rivera's tranquilizing palette: the brown vase of cattails, the caramel leather armchair, a rug the color of dying coral. The therapist opened her door. The first thing I noticed was the size of her face. The therapist had an enormous face. I wondered if this was a problem for her, since Korean women are so self-conscious about the size of their faces that they will go under the knife to shave their jawlines down (a common Korean compliment: "Your face is so small it's the size of a fist!"). I went into her office and sat down on her couch. She told me she was going to begin with some standard consultation questions. The questions she asked were indeed standard: Was I hearing voices in my head? Having suicidal thoughts? I was soothed by how standard these questions were since it assured me that my depression was not in fact me but a condition that was typical. I answered her consultation questions despondently; I might have even hammed up my despondency, to prove to her, and myself, that I needed to be there. But when she asked, "Was there ever a time in childhood where you felt comfort?" I searched for a memory, and when I couldn't recall a time, I collapsed into sobs. I told her the beginning of everything--my depression, my family history--and when our consultation was over, I felt remarkably cleansed. I told her I'd like to see her again. "I'm not sure I'm taking any more patients with Aetna," the therapist said neutrally. "I'll contact you soon." The day after, I went ahead and called her office phone to set up another appointment. When I didn't hear from her after twenty-four hours, I left two more messages. The following day, she left a voicemail, telling me she couldn't take me as a patient since she'd decided to stop taking Aetna insurance. I immediately called back and left my own voicemail explaining that Aetna would reimburse me 80 percent for all out-of-pocket costs. She didn't return my call. Throughout the week, I left four more voicemails, each one more desperate than the last, begging for her cell number so we could text about this. Then I began to randomly call her and hang up when I got her machine, hoping to catch her between appointments. I did this half a dozen times per day, until it dawned on me that she might very well have caller ID, which shamed me so badly I slunk into bed and didn't come out for the rest of the day. Finally, she left another terse message: "It's a lot of paperwork for you to be reimbursed." I speed-dialed her number and shouted into her machine: "I can handle the paperwork!" While I was waiting for her to call back, I had to attend a reading at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. At this point, I was severely depressed. It was a miracle that I managed to board a plane when all I wanted to do was cut my face off. As expected, the reading went badly. To recite my poems to an audience is to be slapped awake by my limitations. I confront the infinite chasm between the audience's conception of Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don't look the part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We're not racial enough to be token. We're so post-racial we're silicon. I recited my poems in the kazoo that is my voice. After my reading, everyone rushed for the exit. At a layover in the Denver airport on my way back to New York, I saw the therapist's number on my phone. "Eunice!" I shouted into the phone. "Eunice!" Was it rude to call her by her first name? Should I have called her Dr. Cho? I asked her when I could make my next appointment. Her voice was cold. "Cathy, I appreciate your enthusiasm," she said, "but it's best you find another therapist." "I'll handle the paperwork! I love paperwork!" "I can't be your therapist." "Why not?" "We're not right for each other." I was shocked. Every pore in my skin sang with hurt. I had no idea that therapists could reject patients like this. "Can you tell me why?" I asked feebly. "I'm sorry, I cannot." "You're not going to give me a reason?" "No." "Why not?" "I'm not allowed to reveal that information." "Are you serious?" "Yes." "Is it because I left too many voicemails?" "No," she said. "Are you seeing someone I know?" "Not to my knowledge." "Then it's because I'm too f***ed up for you, isn't it?" "Of course not," she said. "Well, that's how I'm going to feel if you don't tell me why. You're making me feel like I should never open up and never share my feelings because I'm going to scare everyone away with my problems! Isn't this the opposite of what a therapist is supposed to do?" "I understand how you feel," she said blandly. "If I do anything drastic after this phone call, it will be all your fault." "This is your depression talking." "It's me talking," I said. "I have another patient waiting," she said. "Don't f*** her up too," I said. "Good-bye." Excerpted from Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.